Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut

Friday, February 27, 2015

Samizdat of Breathing

In a prologue letter to her readers Hawkins says we are all voyeurs, gazing through windows on our morning commute, speculating about the lives of those whose homes and streets we pass The Girl on the train

We rarely in life say exactly what we mean, or what we want. In real speech, our humour and our pathos comes out in the longing beneath our words. Sometimes this is expressed in non sequiturs, the side-slips of conversation that reveal our lack of attention... He doesn't just show you what these people say and do; he shows you how they breathe. Breath. Dialogue, and its undercurrents, are always about breath. We breathe in, and on the outward breath we speak. Beneath the breath is the pause, the ribcage full of longing. We hold our breath with desire, with shock, expel it with fury. In the rhythm of breath is the secret of dialogue. A writer learns to listen to the words, but also to the silence, the pauses, the hesitation and the longing – the subtext – that lies beneath. All of that is in dialogue that pulls you not just along, but under. But it all begins with that first act, that careful moment of listening. Art of Dialogue

Under Cold River"...attempts at difference had the opposite effect to the one intended. For they emphasized that, in the midst of this randomness, you saw only the one identical expression: eyes staring into the distance, and lips held firmly shut as though against some pervasive infection Our people had collectively solved their shared problem, which was how to keep the mask in place, while showing that it is only a mask. People collaborated in the great deception, so as not to be deceived."

Scruton's book examines Prague life under the unrelenting pressure of communism, and it's desire to create sameness and eradicate personal opinions and choices. Seen most in the world of literature, where writers were commonly arrested and jailed, sometimes executed, the lack of freedom of expression was so controlled as to prevent personal thoughts. Just the idea of waving at someone insinuated a further connection, a nefarious plan under way.

The police were calculating and cold in their efforts to cool any uprisings by suppressing everything written, even harmless works of literature. In result, much more harmful (to Communism at least) works were perpetrated in secret in opposition to the force of evil. Dissident authors and writers wrote secretly, as their work (or even having it in possession) could land them into jail. But they did not quit, and if anything, while its exposure may have been limited to the literary few, it probably saved them mentally.

The novel begins with a woman being arrested who was secretly known for copying dissident works into books. Her son involved, she takes all the blame and is jailed. Lost for what to do, he himself a writer as well, wanders the underground (both literally and figuratively) trying to figure out what to do. Soon he meets an attractive woman who leads him on a path to produce his literature but with a theory: become famous in the outside world so much that Czech officials can't touch him without political repercussions.

But who is she, and what is her intentions?

"A curious thought entered my mind: that she had quite separate lives. The thought no sooner occurred than it became a knife of jealousy. The girl who cultivated dissidents, what was exploring the world of the samizdat, who was in some strange way excited by the opportunity to recreate me as a hero and a martyr, was the holiday version of another being entirely."

Filled with beautiful and nuanced sentences, the novel contrasts the barbaric stomping out of words with the subtlety and pleasure of well-written prose. The author contrasts these so clearly that one can't help but feel the tension between the political forces at play and the hearts behind the written word. It's not idealistic, some of the samizdat writers were jerks too, not to be trusted and often arrogant. But their opposition, in whole, to the entire movement to destroy them only makes them more fascinating.

Scruton's writing is unusual. A narrator who thinks wisely and yet makes naive assumptions, who loves and yet distrusts; a complicated man in every sense.

Wisdom listens ... As the wise Vrbov Cemetery mortalist, David BenATAR, once noted even turning blood into ink is bad as "our lives are ultimately meaningless. We cannot satisfy the need for meaning in the mundane." Our human 'iron curtain like' predicament also means that it is impossible to realise genuine escape: "We are in a bind, a fix, a jam, we can't get out, and there is no one to help us ...We are caught in an "existential vise" between life and death ..6."

Kneading memory makes the dough of fiction; which we know, sometimes never stops rising ...

"We Became River"
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."
— G. K. Chesterton via AFL Legend and a Briliant Aboriginal Mittleuropean Mark Heiss

According to a quote sometimes attributed to not so great Jozef Imrich and the great Albert Einstein: "It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay in trouble and with problems longer."

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

"My position is that you cannot work towards peace being peaceful. If the peace is to be one where everybody’s quiet and doesn’t open up ... share what’s unspeakable ... offer unsolicited criticism ... defend others’ rights to speak and encourage discourse — that peace is worth nothing. It reminds me of the kind of peace that was secured in my old country under the Communist regime. That is the death of democracy. That might have consequences as bad as war—bloody war and conflict. So, to prevent the world from bloody conflict, we must sustain a certain kind of adversarial life in which we are struggling with our problems in public."
~ Krzysztof Wodiczko

“The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way

"Cold River's" history keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose. [Cold as ice, but in the soulful hands the story melts ...]
~ John le Carre

"Read Shakespeare. There's more in Shakespeare about power, decision-making, ambition, and how people are blinded by their own needs that's so incredibly applicable [even today]. To see it in that context is something that makes it real."
Brad McMillan

“An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.”
~Randall Jarrell, “Ten Books” (The Southern Review, Autumn 1935)

François-Marie Arouet aka Voltaire tends to share the most profound observation: “God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh”

However meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth … steps in and does something. So, the poet Robert Frost said, "no tears in the writer, no tears in the reader".
Is it more foolish to risk your life or risk wasting your life? To live at all is miracle enough ...

Q. How did you get into philosophy in the first place?
A. Failure
— a soulmate, Simon Critchley

MEdia Dragons are keen observers of leadership and politics in all its drama and absurdity.

“My theory has always been to write a real small story against a big background.”
~ Burt Kennedy

As Dr Cope once observed about knowledge and wisdom "...all the data in the world is in the ocean, however the value is in the fish"

There’s so much that’s unsayable and unspeakable about Iron Curtain escapes, but when it comes time for the story to be told, it takes over...There is more to it than any summary could hope to capture.

Dylan Thomas pointed out that the best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps ... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in.

Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.
— Henry Green
p

Cold River is like a secret image, a photograph is a secret about a secret. It is about surviving and playing the cards that are dealt you, even if it looks like a losing hand. The more it tells you the less you know... The anthropological folkloric tale is about the strange relationship between a secret and knowledge. A secret is, necessarily, relational—like difference, it needs another just to exist, whether to be shared in confidence or because it cannot be shared. It is a perfect book for paranoid times ...

'This story is more than a history of escapes. It’s not easy to say where, exactly, you would shelve it. It could be under memoir. Or is it more like anthropology? . . . The other option would be farce just like the life under communism ...
The aim of Cold River is to prepare a person for death...

"We all know that funny feeling of filthiness, of ickiness. It's a feeling we call the prick of conscience when we make a compromise that we have doubts about. So we think about it again and again, and... we even worry about it somewhat, even though the compromise may have made life easier, compared to what would have happened had we not made it. But for myself...I see that my bravery comes out of cowardice, because I am afraid of feeling that ickiness of feeling that I've done something wrong, that I've made an undesirable compromise, that I've side-stepped; and conversely when I do something that I know is right, I can even have a feeling of euphoria."
~ Vaclav Havel

If you think you're too small to make a difference, try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito

Frequently, one of the best ways to get insight into a culture is through its humour ...
So under communism when we wanted to hear God laugh, we made meticulously planned escapes from the totalitarian regimes. Our young fragile ironic stories under totalitarianism were not crying out to be told. And yet ....

Mark Twain once said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamppost how it feels about dogs.
~ German Shepard Bessie

Like the ForeReads or Outline, Cold River and Media Dragon are not for everyone. It's for bohemians like you...
Outline

Good blogging like journalism is sharing what somebody else does not want printed; everything else is public relations... It is our business to know something about every subject – or to know where to get the knowledge (Dr Cope, J Hatton, MO'N etc ) One of our strengths is finding stories in unexpected places ...

MEdia Dragons are known for their 6-foot-2 stature and are often expected by totalitarian characters to play villains... There’s a deeper poetry and music that runs through and beneath the Cold River...

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you."
~Matthew 7:7 (Ask, Seek, Knock )

Consider why you should not go through life without seeking Simon Sinek or seeking the story of the Cold River ...Please suspend your disbelief: “I write about my father and mother, their generation, and my own limited experience, our struggle for individual freedom and self-expression in the Mitteleuropean Orwelean society. Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it. We need to remember that all rivers are fearless and free. They come and go as they please, and borders or governments do not bind them. All rivers are filled with liquid histories and stories. Shame, failure, despair, utter horror, these are all stations on the journey, even after completing a ‘draft of a draft.' Slavic Blues Memoir, the offspring of the slave narrative ...
Certain stories that get virtually no traction nevertheless involve phenomena that are quite important in understanding the way the world operates. For instance, not a lot of people know that 'Cold River' is everywhere as it is the history of the entire world: As every of the tyrant it has deposed ...
Many things in life – oh so many more than we think – can never be explained at all...
“One must be something in order to do something,” Goethe counseled a young friend in 1824 ..." Our story emerges from our bones! And why we are not satisfied with simply making an impression; why do we want to mark our readers and listeners for life?"

Great writing is like diving: anybody can get from the platform to the pool—or the pavement—but some, with grace and sweat and just a bit of swag, can make that brief passage through the air angelic in its beauty and terror. “We started talking about dying long before the first one of us jumped ...

"No one leaves home, unless home is the mouth of a shark. You only run for the border when you see your whole city running as well. You have to understand that no one puts children in a boat, unless the water is safer than the land."
~ 'Home' by Warsan Shire

If you are in the business of finding out what’s true — whether that business is social science, military intelligence, journalism, the hard sciences or something else — there is an elusive quality you find among the best in the field. It might be called the Cold Eye. It’s not a term you will find in textbooks. It’s a matter of character as much as professional skill. It’s some combination of having the mental discipline to gird yourself against your own biases, the instinct to resist the tendency to think that knowledge once learned is static and an ability to look at more signals, data points and ideas from disparate places than other people usually do.
Perhaps more important, the Cold Eye is motivated by a deep intellectual independence and a passionate psychological connection to telling the truth.
~ Tom Rosenstiel

I even ignored advice to change my name ... If I wasn't Jozef Imrich, I'd probably think that Jozef Imrich has a lot of answers myself.

Most writers waste people’s time with too many words. I’m trying to reduce everything
down to the minimum. My last work will be a blank piece of paper.
— Beckett

What an ordinary, artificial life I’ve led. And how ordinary and artificial it is to write about it, as if for ‘posterity’. What do I have to say? In an absolute sense, nothing. And that’s what I’m saying.
— Frenet, Journal

... “If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr
“Show me somethin’ dat caution ever made!”
~ Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God Freedom or Death: Ondrej a Milan
"I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian – on the left and on the right. The Totalitarian is the enemy

There are no depths of irony, or bad taste, to which extreme communists or rotten capitalists won’t sink if they think they can grab power or make money out of it...

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come… We live everything as it comes, without warning.

We can only compare Cold River to reading the Bible :-) So escape the beaten path ...

When you read your own work as something fresh, something strange, it can be very exciting – especially if there’s time to make revisions. But then, once published, you almost inevitably discover typos, mistakes, and causes for regret and even remorse. As in a lover’s quarrel, sometimes we wish we could take the words back. But it’s almost never possible. …

Breaking News

“The Edge... There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

Support Us by Supporting Our Trendsetter
Get comfortable with being uncomfortable, because this is where the magic happens.
It may seem really strange but I feel as though I actually died some time ago and I’m living in an afterlife. Only in the age of Amazon.com age is a Tale like Cold River by Imrich possible … in 21st century after all,the greatest things in life are shared on the web
Cold River: fast-moving digital waters

“If you know how to read, you do not need many books […] Learn to meditate on a few lines, even from a mediocre author; nothing bears fruit unless it is rooted in meditation.”
~ Jean-Baptiste Henri-Dominique Lacordaire (1802-1861), the French priest who reestablished the Dominican Order after it was neutralized following the French Revolution

We are not the wordly boys we used to be on the interrete. We are no longer desirable, We are off-putting in some way. It’s not just that We have put on weight, or that our face are puffy from the drinking and the lack of sleep; it’s as if people can see the damage written all over us, they can see it in my face, the way we hold ourselves the way we move ...

Maybe we are crazy. Maybe we will change the world: If you live life to the point of tears every Negative has a Positive, You just have to look for it. Blogs Help to filter the world ;-) Without Struggle/No Freedom ...

Sole survivors might often be thought of as anonymous, but we never want to be voiceless. Why true stories and icebergs say so much ... The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Till taught by pain or borders less travelled, men really know not what freedom's worth: # Each Age Calls forth its own Bohemian Voice... Elena Ferrante

Sandra Cisneros tells us, Write about what makes you different.
Your readers want to see the world through your eyes ... A sole survivor explores the world where the 'other' fears to tread and creates the most unlikely true story you'll ever read. You are different and so is Cold River:

There may be no greater act of bravery for someone with a fear of needles than to donate blood. Of course, it's this kind of giving that is so important to maintaining the Red Cross's life-saving stocks

What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist, wrote Salman Rushdie. The Iron Curtain came down since Rushdie's novel, the Satanic Verses, earned the Booker Prize-winning novelist death threats, but the question persists.

MEDIA DRAGON We search the world ... So you can read thoughtful and down to earth media dragons at one place

Can one person make a difference? It's easy to be cynical about the power of one. But a person's importance, so difficult to quantify in life, is perhaps more easily measured in death – and the gaping holes left behind